Didier Stevens

Someone mentioned on a forum that he found a picture with an embedded, XORed executable. You can easily identify such embedded executables by xorsearching for the string “This program must be run under Win32”. But if the author or compiler modifies this DOS-stub string, you will not find it.

That’s how I got the idea to add an option to search for PE-files: search for string MZ, read the offset to the IMAGE_NT_HEADER structure (e_lfanew), and check if it starts with string PE.

Example: XORSearch.exe -p test.jpg

Found XOR A2 position 00005D1D: 000000E8 ........!..L.!This program cannot be r
Found XOR A2 position 0001221D: 00000108 ........!..L.!This program cannot be r

We found 2 embedded executables in test.jpg (XOR key A2). Remark we didn’t provide a search string, only option -p.

XORSearch also reports the value of e_lfanew and the string found in the DOS-stub. This allows you to inspect the results for false positives.

This can also be used on unencoded files, like this installation file:

XORSearch.exe -p c8400.msi
Found XOR 00 position 00236400: 000000E8 ........!..L.!This program cannot be r
Found XOR 00 position 00286000: 00000100 ........!..L.!This program cannot be r
Found XOR 00 position 00346800: 000000F8 ........!..L.!This program cannot be r
Found XOR 00 position 003A7200: 00000080 ........!..L.!This program cannot be r
Found XOR 00 position 003AD200: 00000080 ........!..L.!This program cannot be r
Found XOR 00 position 004B4800: 00000108 ........!..L.!This program cannot be r
Found XOR 00 position 004DE600: 000000F8 ........!..L.!This program cannot be r
Found XOR 00 position 004FE200: 000000E0 ........!..L.!This program cannot be r
Found XOR 00 position 00520C00: 000000E0 ........!..L.!This program cannot be r
Found XOR 00 position 00542000: 000000E0 ........!..L.!This program cannot be r
Found XOR 00 position 00562400: 00000100 ........!..L.!This program cannot be r
Found XOR 00 position 0058F800: 000000E0 ........!..L.!This program cannot be r

Finally, I added option -e (exclude). This excludes a particular byte-value from encoding. If you suspect a file is XOR encoded, but that byte 0x00 is not encoded, you use option -e 0x00.

XORSearch_V1_10_0.zip (https)
MD5: 23809A03C63914B0742B7F75B73E1597
SHA256: 97BFBC5E8C59F60E10ABDA2D65DF4200B10BE14662D4A447797B341C9AAE17D8